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Saturday, March 1. 2008

Looks like some things happened the last week while I was mostly
unconscious: Fidel Castro stepped down; Pervez Musharaf got booted
out; Ehud Barak is back in charge of the IDF and threatening wars
against Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and who knows where else. Obama won
three more primaries, and has pulled ahead of Clinton in the Texas
polls, as well as nationwide polling. Not sure what all else has
changed, but Iraq looks pretty familiar.

Tom Engelhardt: The Million Year War (How Never to Withdraw from
Iraq). A good, general survey of the current state, complete
with links. The current game plan is to win by playing the clock,
figuring the longer they can stretch things out the more inured
we and they will be to the inevitability of endless occupation.
That plays better here than there for the simple reason that it's
a lot easier for us to pretend there doesn't exist than it is for
them.

Nir Rosen: The Myth of the Surge.
Reporting on the ground, with the Sunni militias the US has been
subsidizing as proxies to fight against "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," or at
least to hold their fire on US troops for a while.

Michael Kinsley: Defining Victory Downward.
No reporting here. Kinsley just looks at the semantics behind the
"surge" -- that like a wave there would be a surge of troops in,
that would in turn allow more troops to leave -- and concludes
that the lack of withdrawal shows the lack of success. Sounds
right as far as it goes. One problem with battling on the front
of rhetoric is that it's easy for a pundit to get tripped up.
Kinsley writes:

Skepticism seems like sour grapes. If you opposed the surge, you
have two choices. One is to admit that you were wrong, wrong,
wrong. The other is to sound as if you resent all the good news and
remain eager for disaster. Too many opponents of the war have chosen
option No. 2.

Sour grapes may be bad manners in Kinsley's game, but it's hard to
see any basis for admitting error in opposing the surge (let alone the
whole debacle), and it's at least arguable that what's being passed as
"good news" is itself a recipe for disaster. The surge was initially
proposed as an alternative to the Baker-Hamilton proposal to work out
a negotiated political disengagement. It spiked the violence to record
levels, which only started to decline when the US switched tactics to
sponsor the Awakenings militias. The net effect is that the US bought
a little time while adding fuel to the potential civil war and failing
to resolve any significant political problems -- not least the most
important, which is when the US will give up.

It's never been possible to conceive of what a US "victory" in
Iraq might be, at least within the fevered imaginations of the Bush
administration crowd. Force alone certainly doesn't work: Israel has
an unbroken string of victories over the Palestinians but has only
managed to dig itself into a deeper, more debilitating conflict.
Even that may look good to Bush: it buys time, the mess eventually
becoming someone else's problem. On the other hand, stretching this
war out indefinitely only compounds the already immense damage. One
need only look at Afghanistan, where whole generations have grown
up knowing nothing but war.

Kinsley's "remain eager for disaster" implies that disaster hasn't
struck yet. If we're eager for anything, it's that people recognize
the disaster that has already occurred.

I've seen a report that 64% of Israelis favor direct talks with
Hamas, but we also see reports calling for Israel to escalate its
war. One thing I haven't seen is anyone arguing that Israel should
just cut Gaza loose, which seems rather strange given that Sharon's
settler withdrawal promised to do just that -- in many minds, even
if not in Sharon's. A Gaza free to elect its own leaders and plot
its own foreign policy would necessarily be more moderate than the
current unoccupied-but-overlorded territory, if only because it
would have to deal directly with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the EU, the
UN, etc., instead of having everything pass through Israeli hands.
Losing Gaza would also make it easier to cut a separate deal with
Abbas in the West Bank (not that that seems all that likely).